I’ll tell you, I’m probably passing by the bustling two-year-old Daiso store on relatively flat Post Street like twenty times a week and yet I had no idea it was there until just recently.

(The reason being is that this Daiso is hiding in one of those horrible 60’s-style, earthquake-unsafe, concrete mini-malls* that make J-Town look like a ghost town, like the Land of Wind and Ghosts, even though sometimes Japantown has a lot of foot traffic in some of its stores.)

Anyway, the Yelpers think that this outlet is small, but I think it’s huge. You should get over there just for the laughs. I guarantee you’ll find something you’ll enjoy seeing (even if you don’t buy anything).

So, go to that horrible concrete tower** what symbolizes Japantown and then head across that horrible concrete plaza towards downtown and you’ll bump right into it. (I think there’s a new sign that says “East Mall” or something – right there.

Click to expand

22 Peace PlzSte 400San Francisco, CA 94115

Enjoy!

* They Should All Be Destroyed. And hey, thanks San Francisco Redevelopment Agency! What’s this you say? You eliminated “blight” in the Western A? Hellooooo, R.A.? Youis blight. You are the #1 blight producer in the 415! Veritably, you are the melon-farmingC&C Blight Factory. A little self-awareness would help. Hey, why not have a ceremony and apologize to everybody about what you’ve been doing in the Fillmore the past half-century plus? All right, Go Forth and Sin No More.

**Actually, it’s somewhat historically accurate (I think it’s inspired from similar towers in the Nara region) to the shock of most Japanese, who consider it something Chinese, or something, just anything but Japanese-style.

See? That would be a lot of territory to cover, and parts of it would be quite hilly indeed. The pass over Alamo Heights is at McAllister and Divisidero (which is why the Snickerdoodle bike path is there), but I guess they don’t want to shut down Divis.

Anyway, at the very least, this is one of the proposals. I’ll tell you, a lot of fixie riders will not be able to handle this part of Golden Gate Avenue – going up (lack of gearing) and going down (lack of brakes).

Suffice to say this will be the territory covered, mas o menos. Anyway, I thought I’d share it with you, as I was unaware of any map at all.

(Look forward to a revised map. I’d be shocked if this version gets green-lighted)

You all know Webster Street, right? It’s Fillmore’s little buddy, taking people from Market Street north all the way up to our mismanagedMarina Yacht Harbor.

But take a look here to see what happens after it crosses Hayes Street. It turns into boulevard for some odd reason, for some 11 blocks, only to shrink back down again into a regular street at the intersection at Bush.

Looking north. The traffic heading up this street, (like the silver SUV) needs to jog right to get on the other side of the very wide median See that? It’s goes parking lane, bike lane, slow lane, fast lane, huge median, fast lane, slow lane, bike lane, and then another parking lane:

Here’s a bird’s-eye view. From Grove to Bush, from the Western Addition to “Little Osaka” (the cartographers’ favorite term for what people actually call Japantown in real life) it’s an unbusy boulevard, for an only-Gaia-knows-why purpose:

I cry foul.

Here’s a modest proposal – why not de-boulevard(v.t.) Webster by getting rid of the useless treed-up median and the twin northbound lanes for the entire three-quarters of a mile? Would anybody miss the median and the extra lanes? I mean, Fillmore does the all the heavy lifting with traffic and buses and whatnot, right?

That would leave us with 200,000 square feet of space to do whatever we want with. What would you do with 3.5 football fields worth of space?

In Japantown, some people already want to shut down the northbound lanes for extra parking or for temporarily housing businesses displaced by planned seismic upgrades for buildings on Post Street. But why not just kill the whole boulevard now in one fell swoop?

(Poorly-designed Octavia Boulevard has the opposite problem of having too much stalled traffic idling away, blocking travelers journeying east and west. Oh well.)

It sounded like an airplane crashing into the Fillmore Center, if you happened to be at the intersection of Geary and Divisidero as I happened to be. Was it a groundstrike into Hayes Valley or the Western Addition or (or the NoPA, oh no, not the NoPA!) or Pacific Heights?

Oh, here she is, fixing the transformer of a 1976 Camaro in the movie Transformers:

Or maybe PG&E, perhaps they could help….

It was Miller Time at the scene of yesterday’s lightening strike after workers towed away the cars and patched things back up. Actually, strike that, the bolt darkened the ground so let’s call it a darkening strike.

You knew that something big was going in Japantown when you saw this big sign go up last week – lots of people worked late into the night to make sure Saturday’s opening of the glassy “NEW PEOPLE” centre went off without a hitch.

Putting the finishing touches on the second-floor carousel at 9:00 PM. Click to expand:

First, get up to speed on this issue here. The latest is this – San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi is fully engaged on the question of whether the Nihonmachi Street Festival should be allowed to continue next year. And guess what? He’s in favor of festivals. Ross believes there’s room for accomodation and compromise on this issue. Quite a reasonable approach, actually

Ross Mirkarimi in dialogue with the Japantown community on Post Street yesterday.

It appeared the residents of 1600 Webster had full access to their parking spaces during the entire festival. We’ll have to wait and see how dirty Post Street is today.

The lively Nihonmachi Street Fair adds a little color to an otherwise dreary day. There were no signs of life at the million dollar condos at 1600 Webster on the left. Click to expand:

And since we’re here, let’s go through a bit of the letter:

…this Association (along with other members of this neighborhood) must tolerate what seems to be an endless use of Post and Webster Streets

“Members” of a neighborhood? NIMBY alert!

for a series of look-alike street fairs with the same purveyors of schlocky souvenirs,

You can find a lot of schlocky stuff at street fairs, that’s true.

mediocre food stands and exhibitors

One person’s mediocre exhibitor is another’s treasured community member, right?

There is no other neighborhood which is asked to put up with these sorts of disruptions, and that, of course, doesn’t include the disruption presented by the Fillmore Street Fair which is only one block away.

That’s the plaintive wail of the NIMBY, no doubt about it now.

The streets and sidewalks of this neighborhood are usually filthy,

Boy, this reads just like a real estate agent’s brochure, doesn’t it?

especially those that surround that appalling mall,

This appears to be a reference to Post Street’s Kintestsu Mall, which probably wasn’t the best idea to come out of the 1960’s. You can ride your bike down cycle-friendly Post Street all the time and be unaware all the activity going on up inside the mall at night. Of course, it’s kind of an old-fashioned idea to wall off all these folks from the street, as J-Town appears to be a dead area most of the time.

Today’s issue is the question over why people who seem unable to handle Japantown’s rich pageant would move into a building specifically designed to have a “Japanese look” and then hate on harmless street festivals. The world wonders.